Tunnel Flights
by Something.Myffic
Summary: Written a while ago for the Summer Challenge on LJ. AU, Kuro/Fai, Syaoran/Sakura. The apocalypse has been and gone, and the people who survived it are something less than civilized. Pretension aside, it's about motorcycle races.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Tunnel Flights (p1)

Author: Smoke

Rating: PG-13 (Language, dangerous situations, mild sexual content)

Summary: For the Summer Challenge, I started a shiny new AU. (Lol I'm screwed.) I used the splash from ch 6.

A/N: Although I love motorcycles, I cannot talk very coherently about how they work, so these are future motorcycles that are similar to ours in that they have two wheels and go really fast.

There was a loud thump, a hiss, and a piece of piping fell to the ground with a clatter, closely followed by a lanky, blonde man. Fortunately, he didn't hit the ground. Another man, tall and dark-haired with red eyes, was in the way.

"Fuck! Ow!."

"Kuro-chan caught me," the blonde man said, smiling happily.

"What were you doing up there, idiot?"

The man pulled off his night-vision goggles and winked a blue eye at the man holding him. "You can let me down now, Kuro-tan."

Kurogane dropped him, rolling his eyes. "You're so weird, Fai."

Fai rolled across the dusty floor and picked up the length of pipe, waggling it at Kurogane. "See, Kuro-meanie, I was trying to get this."

"What's it for?" Kurogane said, curiosity finally piqued.

"Ah, Kuro-zoom's bike needs a new heat vent," Fai said. "And this pipe is dead." He pulled his goggles back down and walked over to the motorcycle that was in the center of the room. Whistling, he lit a welding torch and set to work.

"What happened to the old one?" Kurogane asked.

"Speak up, Kuro-tan, this thing is loud."

"I said, what happened to the old vent?"

"You burned through it in the race two days ago, Kuro-chan. Your engine runs too hot. You know if you can feel the heat you're supposed to slow down."

"Then I'd go slower," Kurogane pointed out.

"You wouldn't explode."

"I might lose."

"You wouldn't explode."

"I wouldn't make money."

"Kuro-chan is so reckless. You can't make money if you're dead."

"Tch," Kurogane muttered, ending the conversation without really admitting anyone was wrong.

Fai turned off the torch and wiped his face with a rusty, sooty glove. "Phew, this is hot. I wonder if we can get the fans working, Kuro-mi?"

Kurogane shrugged. "We can try. We've got enough electricity."

The blonde smiled at him. "Yeah, it was good of you to work so hard to get us a home next to the generators. You're useful!"

"Wasn't I useful before?" Kurogane grumbled.

"Mm, a little," Fai said, pushing his goggles up again. They pulled his hair, which was getting a little long, back from his forehead like a headband. He had soot, or maybe it was just dust, smudged on his face. It looked dark against his pale skin, but then again, most people were pale here. Kurogane had an almost tanned look to him, but it wasn't from sun, just his complexion. He hadn't been in the sun for years. None of them had.

"Try the engine," Fai said in a self-satisfied kind of way.

Kurogane did, pausing only to say, "You smell like engine grease."

"So what?" Fai said. "I love this smell."

The engine was running cooler now – At least you could sit on the seat comfortably. "Where's the brat?"

"Syaoran-kun is talking to Sakura-chan again," Fai said shortly.

"… Oh."

"Maybe you should talk to him, hm?"

"Fine," Kurogane said, walking over to the ladder on the far side of the room. "But I'm not good at this stuff."

The third member of their team was a teenager. He couldn't ride yet, at least, not quite as well as Kurogane. But he was a good, willing learner, all the more willing because he had a goal.

Kurogane paused and listened for a few seconds before going inside the room. He heard Syaoran, talking as usual, about the same things he mostly did. " – Going to learn to race, and get you a medic with the money. And then you can wake up. I was wondering – Fai-san said he's sure you can hear me. Maybe when you wake up, you'll remember what I said, Sakura-chan." A brief pause, and a sigh. "You have such a nice name. There are no more flowers. Only you."

Syaoran said these same things, or a variation on them, every night. It was like a ritual, as if treating her like she was awake would somehow bring her out of the coma.

Kurogane went down a few rungs on the ladder as quietly as he could, then made a point of being noisy on his way back up.

"Hey kid," he said too-loudly. "You up here?"

Syaoran came to the doorway of the room. "Yes. I was- "

"Yeah."

Kurogane noticed that the girl who lay on the cot on the floor was not wearing the dress she always had on. Instead, she was wearing overalls – Probably Syaoran's castoffs – in their team colors, white, black, and orange. "You changed her clothes."

"I closed my eyes," Syaoran said, turning slightly pink.

Kurogane had to admire this kid. He was pretty much the typical all-around good guy, dependable, honest, and noble. These were rare qualities Underground. It was a miracle he'd grown up so well, really. There weren't many kids his age who would go through all this stuff for a girl, either. It was wildly idealistic, and it appealed to Kurogane, which was why he'd agreed to let the kid stay with them.

"He fixed up my bike," he said finally, jerking a thumb in the general direction of downstairs and Fai. "Want to give it a go?"

Syaoran's eyes got wide. "You mean your bike? But you – "

"Yeah. You're not bad, you won't trash it."

- this is a pagebreak -

Underground, night was when you made it. The massive lights that lit up the bigger tunnels and spaces got dim after ten. Because team Tsubasa lived so close to the generators, Fai had actually figured out a way to stop the lights on one of the disused tunnels near them from going out. It made for a good practice track.

The motorcycle's roar echoed in the tunnel, so Kurogane, standing off to the side, had to shout to be heard. "Turn left… I said don't let up on the throttle so much!" There was a second when he thought the kid was going to fall, but somehow Syaoran righted himself and continued. Kurogane grinned. It was exactly what he would have done.

Syaoran stopped in a spray of dirt, the dust drifting up towards the light. "Was that okay?"

"You're getting there," Kurogane said. "Lean into the turns more. Give it one mo– "

Fai, who had just walked into the tunnel, interrupted him. "Kuro-tan, you should both go to bed. You have a big race tomorrow."

"I'm fine," Kurogane grumbled.

"Syaoran-kun has to go to sleep, it's very late," Fai said, solving two problems at once. "And I have to run a check on your motor before tomorrow, so let's go back, okay, Kuro-pon?"

"Don't call me stupid names," Kurogane said under his breath, but brought the motorcycle inside while Syaoran climbed back upstairs, presumably to check on Sakura before he went to sleep.

He sat on the floor next to the bike, Fai's toolbox in his lap, as the mechanic unbolted the wheel covers and switched the practice tires with the racing set. "Hey. Why do you think he takes care of her like that?"

Fai frowned and passed him a wrench. "Give me the next size down. Ah, I think it's something he just… feels he should do. Why shouldn't he?"

Kurogane found the required wrench and said, "Dunno. I guess it's a good thing to do. Just seems…"

"Like a lot of trouble to go through for – Hold this bolt – someone you've never spoken to?"

"Yeah. He's up there all the time, worrying about her."

Fai undid the last bolt and lifted off the cover. "Kuro-zoom is so bad to his tires. Anyway, he's read her letter, right? Sakura-chan seems like a nice girl to me. I think he loves her."

"What letter?"

"She had a letter in her hand. It was very sweet. That's how he knows her name, silly Kuro-chi."

"Huh. So it's because of that letter?"

"Yes. I think Syaoran-kun is a little romantic, isn't he?"

Kurogane nodded a little, despite the fact that Fai probably couldn't see him while concentrating on the bike.

"Besides," Fai said, "If I got caught in a storm and went into a coma, Kuro-chan would take care of me, wouldn't he?"

"You're my mechanic," Kurogane said, suddenly very interested in the bolts he was holding. " 'course I would."

"There you go, then!" Fai said triumphantly. "He just hasn't talked to her yet, that's all. Syaoran-kun is a lot like Kuro-chan. Very loyal and nice."

Kurogane shrugged to hide his embarrassment. "Are you almost done with that?"

"Give me another fifteen minutes and it'll be all ready," Fai reassured him. "I don't want it to spin out on the racetrack any more than you do."

- this is a pagebreak -

The race was over at Pipeside, where the water tower from up above had sunk deep into the soil from its own weight. At first, they'd been terrified it would bring radiation down with it, but it turned out to be clean. If it hadn't been, well, everyone living at Pipeside would be dead and rotting. As it was, a team lived there. Their colors were blue, green, and silver, their symbol a towering wave. They were also, coincidentally, team Tsubasa's rivals. Both teams had expert mechanics and skilled, risk-loving racers. It made their races intense and often well-attended. There weren't many spectator casualties. Unless the spectators were stupider than usual, that is.

"The engine should be able to take a little water but if it gets submerged completely you're screwed," Fai said, hurrying along beside his friend. "And be careful on the turns because this track is muddy and it gets slippery. And they fight dirty, so – "

"Fai," Kurogane said, stopping to grab the mechanic's shoulders. "I'll be fine. I've done this before. Why're you so worried, anyway?"

An air horn sounded. The race was starting soon. " I'll tell you later. Hurry! You don't want him to win, right?"

Kurogane glared at him, but headed for the starting line. Fai had been acting odd lately – Well, Fai always acted odd, he was a complete idiot even though he was a damn good mechanic – and he planned to find out what exactly was bothering him.

A cute girl with long, curly black hair walked out onto the track. She held up two flags, and a dead silence fell over the crowd.

The flags dropped.

Two engines roared.

The crowd exploded into screaming, cheering, delighted chaos.

Kurogane could not help but grin as his motorcycle shot forwards, blurring the walls and ceiling around him. The orange tint of his goggles, the air resistance that was almost like wind, the cool dampness of the waterworks nearby – It was almost enough to make him forget he was underground. He didn't know why so few people did this. It was exhilarating and real in a way nothing else was.

He could hear, above the engine and the wind, the other bike coming up behind him. He swerved to block the other racer, who cursed at him and tried to maneuver up on his right. There was a deep puddle ahead of them, and he knew he wasn't going to be able to avoid it without losing serious ground. Fortunately, he only got a little damp, and the engine stayed mostly dry.

There was one thing he was really worried about, and that was coming right up. There was a deep, tire-marked section of mud on the track. The other racer had home-track advantage, as he was probably used to staying balanced in mud, even at speeds like this.

Kurogane's fears were perfectly well-founded. The mud made the bike hard to control, almost like riding on sticky sand. His opponent zipped past him. By the time they were past the mud, the race was neck-and-neck with ten yards to the finish line. Kurogane gritted his teeth and bore down on the accelerator. It was over in a split-second – The race was a perfect tie. The Wave racer lifted his blue-tinted goggles and glowered at Kurogane. Kurogane glared back.

"Tie," announced the woman who was judging.

"I want a rematch," the Wave racer said, and Kurogane agreed perfectly.

"Yeah, a new track," he said. "Let's play it fair."

The Wave racer looked like he was about to punch Kurogane, which the racer privately thought might make for an interesting fight, but his mechanic, a girl with practical, short hair and thick overalls, grabbed his wrist and held on tight. "Stop it."

Fai came running over. "Ah, Kuro-tie, I should have remembered the mud!"

"Not your fault," Kurogane said.

"It's my job," Fai pointed out. "Hey, Kuro-mud's uniform has got on different colors now, hm?"

Kurogane looked at himself. Apparently team Tsubasa's new colors were brown, brown, and orange-brown. "Damn."

"I'm not cleaning it," Fai told him.

"Whatever. Let's go."

Fai picked up his toolbox from the mechanic's pit and followed the racer off the track and out of Pipeside. "You know," he said, "Team Wave's mechanic is really very talented. She's quite young but she knows what she's doing."

"You're talking like you're old," Kurogane said.

"I'm twenty-one. That is old, at least here it is."

This was true. There were very few people over the age of twenty-three Underground. They had mostly died when the radiation hit, twenty-three years ago. The anniversary of the disaster was in a week.

"Whatever," Kurogane said, not stunningly verbose in even his best moods.

Fai shot him a stunning smile and tied his toolbox to the back of the bike. "We're off their territory. Let's go, Kuro-woosh!"

Kurogane got on the bike and Fai got on behind him, wrapping his arms around the racer's waist. (This made Kurogane glad that Fai was behind him and thus could not see his face. He didn't know why he had these stupid fits of blood-to-the-face, only that Fai would never shut up about it if he knew.) "Don't forget to put on your goggles," he said shortly. "The dust gets bad."

"Kuro-zoom acts like I haven't done this before," Fai said. "Stop stalling, it's bad for the engine! Go, go, go!"

There was something nice about the comforting, human warmth of Fai behind him, Kurogane thought. But he wished the mechanic wouldn't yell in his ear.


	2. Chapter 2

Title: Tunnel Flights (p2)

Author: Smoke

Rating: PG-13 (Language, dangerous situations, mild sexual content)

Summary: For the Summer Challenge. I used the splash from ch 6.

A/N: I know what both the Mokonas look like, okay? I just decided to do it this way. Also, a tunnel blaze is a fire that's big enough to block off a tunnel.

There was a roar that echoed through the entire generator as the two bikes revved up. The generator wasn't just big, it was enormous, a testament to the population of the world prior to the war. It was enough to power the Underground for within a radius of almost one hundred fifty miles (Alternately, it could have powered one city block from before the war). Fai didn't know what the world used to look like. He'd heard stories, from older mechanics, from team Rift's sponsor. Apparently, it had been green. There'd been the sun, which was huge, bright, hot, and, high, high in the open sky. Water had been easy to get, before it was contaminated. Technology had not only been better, it had been zipping along, evolving, at least up to the point when the bombs hit. Society had functioned, and functioned well, and there weren't gangs of motorcycle thugs competing for territory. Well. Not many.

Of course, Fai thought fondly, Kuro-chan wasn't a thug. He was really too sweet when you got right down to it.

He turned to the man sitting next to him. "I like the bike," he said, nodding towards the place where the two motorcycles had been not fifteen seconds earlier. There was a cloud of dust now, and nothing else.

"I kept it simple," the other mechanic, Team Rift's Doumeki Shizuka, told him. "It's just got some heavy plating, because he's damned light and I don't want it losing traction. But it's a pretty basic design underneath. Your racer… Damn."

"Nothing too special," Fai said modestly, then laughed and said, "No, it was a lot of work. But worth it! Kuro-puu is a great racer. He deserves a bike to match."

"I bet it runs hot," Doumeki said.

"You have no idea," Fai replied. "I've replaced the vents twice in a month. Twice!"

"Haven't you tried a better cooling system?"

Fai rolled his eyes. "Kuro-daddy isn't really a lightweight. There aren't any systems on the market that will let him keep up his speed."

"Yeah. Hey, how'd you get that acceleration?"

Fai grinned and pulled out his toolbox, complete with diagrams. "Rift is a pretty good team, hm? Doumeki-kun is a dedicated mechanic, and Watanuki-kun seems very happy to race."

"He's a competitive idiot," Doumeki said dismissively, but the pride in his eyes was more than obvious.

"With some practice, your team will be rising in the rankings in no time. Yuuko-san is backing you, huh. How'd you land that?"

Doumeki frowned. "I don't really know. She just… really likes Watanuki, or something. You know. Offered him a job for no reason. She just… pulled me in. Somehow."

"Yuuko-san is one of the oldest women in the Underground," Fai said. "Do you know how she survived this long?"

"She's probably just immune to everything," Doumeki said sardonically. "She drinks like a fish."

"It sounds like you don't like her."

"It's not that," Doumeki said. "I just don't know how much I trust her."

"Trust and like are different things," Fai admitted. "But it's better to have them both, isn't it, Doumeki-kun? Why don't you trust her, then?"

"It's just… One of those things," the mechanic said absentmindedly. He was going through Fai's notes and diagrams and only half-paying attention to what he was saying. "Watanuki gets in trouble sometimes. I can't really pin down how she gets him into it, but… "

"Maybe Watanuki-kun is just too reckless," Fai suggested, but in all truth he had met Yuuko and knew she could probably get away with just about anything she wanted.

"He's not reckless, he's obstinate and stupid. Good cook, though – Hey, what's this letter?"

Fai peered at it. "Oh, it's Sakura-chan's note. I've been holding onto it for safekeeping."

"Who?"

"Sakura-chan is staying with us. You know Syaoran-kun, he's like Kuro-zip's apprentice? He takes care of her. She got caught in a dust storm up Above, for some reason. I don't know why she was up there. But she fell straight onto a safety door. Someone heard the thump and pulled her inside, but they just left her at the side of the road. Syaoran-kun rescued her. She's been in a coma, though. But he takes care of her," Fai smiled brightly at Doumeki. "It's nice to see how good people can be sometimes. That a young kid can take care of a girl he's never met."

Doumeki nodded, smoothing the crinkled note out against his black uniform pants. Rift's colours, chosen by none other than Yuuko, were black, red, and grey. Their emblem was a black, rounded-off rabbit with a red dot on its forehead.

_Dear big brother,_ the letter said in rounded, childish script.

_I want to say this all in a letter because I don't know if I can talk about it. Mother and father have gotten very sick, and they want me to come live with you. I'd like to live with you, but I don't want to inconvenience you or Yukito-san. I hope it's okay… Oh, and they want me to say that, as always, they love you very much._

_Brother, I'm a little scared that mom and dad will__ die__ not get better. I know Yukito-san would like to be a doctor. Do you think he can fix them?_

_I'm excited to see you, but please keep mom and dad safe._

_Love,_

_Sakura_

"Who's Yukito?" Doumeki asked. "You've looked for him?"

Fai nodded. "We haven't found anyone who goes by that name. I'm guessing her parents died after she left. Her brother probably never even found out she was sent."

"Christ," Doumeki muttered.

Fai grabbed his arm and stood up. "Look, here they come!"

The dull roar of two motors was amplified by the interior of the generator, which spat dramatic sparks just as Kurogane passed through it. He was closely followed by Watanuki, who reached the finish line about seven seconds after his opponent.

Kurogane pulled off his goggles, kicked down the stand, and got off the bike. "Good race, kid. What's your name?"

Watanuki sighed and leaned his forehead against his handlebars. "I'm Watanuki Kimihiro. Yeah, good race. You've got some of the best technique I've ever seen."

"Kuro-first has nerves of steel," Fai chirped. "Did you have a fun time, Watanuki-kun?"

"I didn't exactly expect the sparks."

"Oh, right," Fai said. "Yeah, it does that. But they don't hurt if you're wearing gear! And even on bare skin it's just a tingle."

"You're okay?" Doumeki asked his racer, face impassive. Fai was a little surprised – Doumeki had seemed much more obviously concerned a minute ago. But maybe it was to be expected. After all, they were two teenage boys, and that was a time for hormones and pride and awkwardly banal conversation that meant more than they were supposed to…

"I'm fine, of course. Did you think I'd be stupid enough to get hurt?" Watanuki scowled.

Doumeki shrugged.

"Well, I'm not, so you can just stop… looking at me like that."

"You chipped your mirror," the Rift mechanic pointed out.

Briefly, Watanuki looked guilty. "Oh. Um."

"I'll fix it," Doumeki added. "But you're making dinner tonight."

"I always make dinner anyway!"

"I get to decide what we have, then."

Watanuki fumed. Fai laughed quietly. The racer was not as good at pretending to be angry as Kurogane was. It wasn't very convincing.

"Is Watanuki-kun a good cook?" he asked.

"Pretty much," Doumeki said, just as Watanuki said, "I'm still learning."

"It can't be easy," Fai said. "It's not as if there's a lot of selection in what we can eat."

Watanuki, who was apparently easily flustered, said, "Well, the challenge is part of what makes it fun."

"I'll keep it fun for you, then," Doumeki said, quietly triumphant.

"I- wh- What the hell just happened?"

Kurogane leaned forward. "They cornered you. Sneaky bastards, aren't they?"

"Dammit."

-this is a pagebreak-

Syaoran hadn't attended the race. Instead, he stood below a certain safety door at a four-way split in the tunnels. He'd walked all those tunnels as far as he could, trying to find the people from the letter, Sakura's older brother and the unexplained Yukito-san. It was exasperating that this was all he knew of her. This safety door – She'd fallen on it. She'd been traveling near it. That was his only clue. She might have been disoriented, caught in a sandstorm, unsure of where she was going. For all he knew, the people from the letter lived halfway across the world.

He couldn't stop looking, though. Because if she woke up, and he said "Well, I had a name and knew the area but I just gave up after a while…"

No. That would never do. He had to keep looking. He had to keep her safe and happy, no matter what, because if he didn't, who would?

-this is a pagebreak-

Fai was giving Kurogane's bike an intense cleaning and tune-up. "Big race tomorrow," he commented. "Excited, Kuro-tan?"

Kurogane shrugged. "Excited to beat him, yeah."

"Kuro-pon is very sure of himself."

The racer nodded. "Last time, I didn't know the course. But Rift's sponsor gave us permission to race on their track, and both of us – Both teams – know that course. It'll be fair, and I'm going to beat Wave."

"You're always so determined," Fai said, tossing aside a frayed wire. "That's one of the things I like best about you, Kuro-race. You don't give up."

"… like best?" Kurogane said, taken slightly aback and trying to ignore the heat that had suddenly rushed to his face.

"Well, would I be a mechanic for someone I didn't like?" Fai said, smiling. Which was an answer, but not really the answer.

Kurogane coughed. "Yeah. Makes sense."

"You know," Fai said, apparently apropos of nothing, "I think the Rift mechanic is a little sweet on his racer. What do you think?"

"Dunno about that," Kurogane said. "Whatever they want, right?"

"I think it's fairly common, though," Fai continued. "I see a lot of teams like that."

Kurogane nodded, telling himself firmly that No, he doesn't mean it like that, he doesn't.

What if he does?

He cleared his throat. This was intimidating in a way that a motorcycle barreling along a track at ninety miles an hour never would be. "Fai, do you – Have you ever – "

"What is it, Kuro-chan?" Fai asked, busying himself with a ratchet that was approximately the same size as his forearm.

"Would you like," Kurogane began. Fai cut him off before he could finish.

"Remember, Kuro-victory, you have a really important race tomorrow. We don't want you distracted, do we?"

"No," Kurogane said under his breath, "We sure as hell don't want that."

-this is a pagebreak-

Kurogane woke up at seven in the morning to the dull, insistent buzz of his alarm clock. The world was darker than usual. Dimly lit and… white. Textured. Papery. How odd. He put a hand against his eyes.

"That fucking idiot," he muttered, pulling off the note that Fai had taped to his forehead. "Thought I went blind."

Hey, Kuro-chan! I had to go out and get some new wiring – your headlights are shot. I'd wake you up to drive me but you look so cute when you're sleeping, haha! I'll be back soon! Eat a good breakfast, your race is at eight-thirty.

- Fai

When Kurogane got downstairs, Syaoran was already at the table, wolfing down a bowl of oatmeal. He saw the older man come in, dropped his spoon, gave the racer a guilty look, and began to eat more slowly.

"I don't care how fast you eat, kid, and he's not around to mother you," Kurogane said, amused despite himself. "Just don't choke. He'd kill me."

Syaoran nodded, swallowed loudly, and said, "Um, where is Fai-san, then?"

Kurogane waved the note. "He went to get parts."

Syaoran eyed him in the same apprehensive way he had when the man had first walked in. "But that's a twenty-minute walk, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but we've got an hour and a half."

"Um… Kurogane-san… I woke up as Fai-san was leaving. That was a few hours ago," Syaoran said carefully, and flinched when Kurogane glared at him.

"What?"

"He's been gone for a long time," Syaoran said.

Kurogane began to think out loud. "If he ran away he wouldn't have left that stupid note. A few hours? What, was there a blackout or something?"

Syaoran shook his head. "Nothing. No collapses, no tunnel blaze, nothing that would keep him from getting home."

Kurogane stood up, toppling his chair over. It fell to the floor, one of the legs snapping off as it hit the stone. "I'm going to look for him."

He went back towards his room to get his racing clothes. They were heavy, time-worn, comfortable constructions of leather and canvas, made to stand up to being thrown from a moving motorcycle onto gravel. A knife could get through them if you had fifteen minutes and a sharpener. Maybe. If it was a really good knife, at least. As he stripped off the black shirt he'd slept in, he wondered what the hell had happened. Fai was sort of crazy, not in the dangerous-killer way but more in the let's-go-get-drunk-and-sing-karaoke kind of way. He wouldn't hurt a fly, but he might walk off with a sketchy stranger. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Everyone knew it wasn't safe to walk around by yourself. The Underground as a whole wasn't safe. What the hell had he been thinking?

Kurogane's increasingly infuriated train of thought was interrupted by a knock at the door. Fully dressed at this point, he jerked it open. There was little kid standing there. He looked like a street rat, maybe ten or eleven years old. "Um," he said, a little intimidated. "K-kurogane? Suwa Kurogane?"

"What is it?" Kurogane growled.

The kid dropped a small package into his hand, then turned tail and ran. The package was wrapped in a ragged white scrap of cloth. Kurogane opened it – Inside was a tape recorder.

Tentatively, he pressed play. A voice filled the kitchen. It sounded distorted, unrecognizable. "Hello. I just thought you might want to know where your mechanic is. Well, he seems to have taken some sleeping pills. Nothing fatal, you know, but he's going to be out of it for a while. You might want to collect him. We don't have him, of course. He seems to have wandered off Above somewhere. You'd better get looking."

The scrap of cloth was the emblem from Fai's jacket. Kurogane dropped the tape recorder on the ground and ran for his bike. He was going to have to go up Above, and he was going to have to do it fast. He had only a few hours before the serious side-effects of radiation started to set in.

He didn't know it, but the tape recorder kept playing, even as his speeding bike cut grooves into the dirt of the tunnels.

"So," the voice continued triumphantly, "Now you have to choose. The race, or your friend? Which is more important to you? That's right. Think about it good and hard, Kurogane."


	3. Chapter 3

Title: Tunnel Flights (p3)

Author: Smoke

Rating: PG-13, language.

A/N: This was written twenty-four hours too late for my contest deadline. ):

There was nobody around the safety door when Kurogane rode up to it. This was just as well, seeing as anyone who saw him trying to go up Above would doubtless assume he was suicidal and try to stop him, or something stupid like that. He didn't have time for that, not now, so he wrenched the rusted handle to the right and pulled the door open. It moved slowly on disused, creaking hinges. Flakes of rust fell off the handle where he touched it.

Sunlight flooded the tunnel.

Kurogane was not often impressed, or at least he seldom deigned to show it when he was. But this... His jaw dropped. It was brighter than anything he'd ever seen, like Fai's welding torch multiplied a thousand times. It illuminated a wasteland, a massive desert that stretched past the horizon. He could see the wreckage of buildings off in the distance, but nothing real, nothing that showed what the earth had once been. Just... rubble. Cinderblocks, broken glass. Nothing alive.

He'd always sort of thought it would be green. Not this ugly mess of white-yellow-grey-brown.

Still, he got used to it fairly fast, and got ready to rev up his bike and start searching. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of looking up. Above him was an empty blue. For someone who'd spent their whole life having to duck to get anywhere, it was vaguely eerie.

"Fuck," he muttered, looking at the ground and then up again. "Where are you, Fluorite? This place is huge."

Well, there was no point in letting some big blue empty scare him. As long as the motorcycle worked - And it'd work, because Fai had made it - he could search. Fai couldn't be far from the tunnel systems, because whoever had dumped him out here (Kurogane had a pretty good idea who it was, too) wouldn't have wanted to risk getting sick. He'd heard that you got sick in the Above - really sick, that is, not throwing up but braindead or worse - after three hours. Fai had been gone for two.

An hour to find him and get back. Hour and a half at the outside. Well, a mechanic without higher brain functions wasn't going to be helping anybody. Time to get going. Kurogane grinned and pulled down his goggles. Just for now, he didn't have to think about the fact that Fai might be dying or that he was in grave danger. This was just another race.

-this is a pagebreak -

It quickly became clear that he wasn't going to find much of anything just searching randomly. Kurogane needed a vantage point, a way to see a lot of this apparently endless desert without actually going over it. He sped towards the tower that dominated the landscape. Miraculously, the orange-and-white tower was still standing, despite apparently being the tallest building around. It was possibly the biggest thing Kurogane had ever seen. He left the bike tipped on its side next to the outdoor steps and started up the stairs.

Halfway up the staircase, he realized that getting to the top of the stairs was significantly less important than getting high enough to look around. Which, about 300 steps into the tower, he was. He looked out – This place seemed endless, a desolate wasteland devoid of any life or color. It was hardly even sand, the desert. It was more like grey dust or rubble. There was nothing nice about it. It looked threatening in its emptiness.

Light glinting off of something orange caught his eye. It was something far-off, small, and plastic.

Team Tsubasa's goggles were orange plastic. Fai's goggles were orange plastic.

The stairs seemed twice as long on the way down, even though he was sure he was running much faster.

-this is a pagebreak -

Kurogane slowed to a stop as he got closer to the place where he'd seen the plastic. It was hard to navigate without any real landmarks to go by, but the sun was high and bright in the sky, and the plastic glinted bright orange in the sand. It was as bright as the taillights on a cycle, and that was no problem to follow.

The plastic turned out to be an oblong, hexagonal piece of orange-tinted plexiglass. One of the lenses from the goggles, definitely. He pocketed it and looked around. Fai couldn't be too far off, could he? He'd been out here almost half an hour already. Stupid mechanic with all the white on his uniform – He'd be practically invisible against this sand.

Sound carried well up Above -- Kurogane heard someone cough.

Still carrying the goggle lens, he stepped cautiously around the sand dune. That was where he found Fai, groggy and covered in dusty sand, but alive. Definitely alive.

"Ah," Fai said, squinting at him. "It's Kuro-tan."

"What the hell are you doing out here, you idiot?" Kurogane said, speaking gruffly to hide the overpowering sense of relief he felt.

"I'm not sure," Fai said apologetically. "I just woke up. I might be tied up, I can't tell."

Kurogane knelt down beside his mechanic and untied first his wrists and then his ankles. He'd probably gone numb while he was asleep. "You're okay?"

"Ehh. I feel sick."

"Are you gonna throw up?"

"Not sick like that. I mean like sick-sick," Fai said, flexing his fingers and putting a hand to his head.

Kurogane nodded, looked at him, sighed a little too theatrically, and picked him up. "Okay. Let's go."

"I wasn't scared," Fai said in his ear. "I knew Kuro-rin wouldn't just let me die."

-this is a pagebreak -

Syaoran paced up and down in his bedroom. There wasn't much time until the race. If he left now, by himself, he might make it in time, but there was no way Kurogane-san would.

There was nothing else for it. He got on his bike, which was a trainer, but a trainer made by Fai. The agreed-upon racetrack was over at Team Shop's home track. He'd just have to explain the situation and try to postpone the race.

-this is a pagebreak -

There was, at the outside, an entire hour to get back underground. Kurogane was a little worried, but not unduly so. There was still time, and the safety doors were painted red specifically to make them easy to find from the outside.

The wind picked up. Fai's hands, holding tightly to the back of Kurogane's jacket, trembled slightly. "Doing okay?" the racer asked.

"Yeah," Fai said. " 'm just… stiff. Achy."

"We'll be there soon," Kurogane said, no room for questions in his tone.

-this is a pagebreak -

The Wave racer was getting impatient by the time Syaoran got to the track. "Ah, excuse me," the boy said hesitantly, "There's been some trouble. I don't think Kurogane-san can come…"

"The ditched?" the Wave racer said incredulously, and laughed. "What, was he scared?"

"There was some trouble with Fai-san," Syaoran said quietly.

"So you forfeit," the racer said. "We win."

"I was hoping you could, um, wait."

The Wave racer shook his head. "No way. We chose a time and place, and they aren't here. Rules say it's a forfeit, unless there's someone taking his place."

There was already a crowd gathering. Someone yelled, "We came out here for nothing?"

"Umm," Syaoran said, "Umm –"

A sensible, friendly sort of voice spoke from directly behind him. "Well, I've heard this boy is quite a passable racer. He could race in Team Tsubasa's place, couldn't he?"

"What?" said the Wave racer.

"What?" said Syaoran. He turned around. There was a tall man behind him – he looked to be seventeen or thereabouts. He wore team colors Syaoran hadn't seen before, black and navy blue with tiny pink accents.

"Do you think you can do it?" the man asked him. He had short grey hair and looked… trustworthy, in a hard-to-explain way.

"… Maybe," Syaoran said. "Who're you?"

"I'm Yue," the mechanic told him. "It's nice to meet you."

-this is a pagebreak -

The wind was quickly becoming a sandstorm. Fai tied his scarf around his nose and mouth, and then a hankerchief across Kurogane's. He put the lens back in his goggles with an audible click, and wrapped his arms tight around Kurogane's waist.

They drove fast, searching for the bright red of the security door. "Kuro-chan," Fai said, his voice hard to hear over the howling wind, "Would this be a bad time to say I like you?"

For a second, Kurogane couldn't think. Then his mind started racing so fast he couldn't string together a sentence. "Like... how?"

Fai said, "I'm not really sure if I know what I'm saying. I'm... tired."

I hope you do, Kurogane thought fervently, and realized he'd said it out loud when the mechanic laughed.

"I was a little worried Kuro-tan would hate me."

"Stupid. I wouldn't hate you," Kurogane said. "And it's like you said. A lot of teams do it."

"I'm in love with Kuro-zoom," Fai said almost to himself, as if he was trying it out. The sand was getting thicker in the air, and it stung where it touched bare skin.

"Don't say it like we're dying," Kurogane told him.

"I will still be in love with Kuro-zoom when we get home," Fai amended. Kurogane felt the mechanic's grip on his waist slackening.

"Hey. Don't fall asleep. I keep thinking - "

"I'm not going to go into a coma, Kuro-rin," Fai said sleepily. "There are things I want to do first. People I care about. And I have to fix Kuro-bun's headlights."

"The door!" Kurogane yelled. There was something red visible through the driving sand. The safety door.

- this is a pagebreak -

"Good race - What's your name?" Yue asked.

"I'm Syaoran. And it really wasn't," Syaoran said miserably.

Yue's racer passed Syaoran a canned soda. "You almost won. You're, like, eleven. He's eighteen. You totally showed him up."

"I lost," Syaoran said, not pointing out that he hadn't been eleven for several years.

"Doesn't matter," the racer said. "You've got spirit, brat."

"There's this girl," Syaoran admitted.

"Oh yeah? What's she look like? You're impressing her, huh."

"She's got brown hair and green eyes and she's really, really pretty," Syaoran said. "But she's in a coma. I want to pay her medical bills."

"Whoa. Heavy. What's her name?"

Syaoran pointed to the emblem on Yue's uniform. "Sakura. Like your tea-"

The racer spat his drink across the floor. "What the FUCK did you do to my sister?"

The safety doors not two yards away from them clanged open, letting in a burst of sand-filled air, a motorcycle, and two men.

"Kurogane-san?" Syaoran asked.

"He needs a doctor," Kurogane said, gesturing towards Fai as he went about reclosing the doors. "Radiation poisoning."

"I want to know what the hell happened to my little sister!"

"Touya, please," Yue said. "I'm sure it isn't Syaoran-kun's fault."

"How did she get into a coma? She's supposed to be with mom and dad!"

"Um," said Syaoran.

"I said I need a doctor!" Kurogane's voice carried over everything else.

"Yuki can fix him," Touya said.

Yue was already looking Fai over. "Symptoms?"

"I'm really fine," Fai said. "Just a headache. I ache a little. Nothing serious."

"Tilt your head back and look to the left, please," Yue's voice had taken on a professional, clinical tone. Fai obliged. "No discoloring. How many fingers..."

"How does a mechanic know that?" Syaoran whispered.

"Yukito wants to be a doctor," Touya said in a hurried undertone. "But he needs money, and nobody wants a mechanic to take care of them. So he uses another name. That's beside the point, though. Where is Sakura?"

"Oh! She mentioned you in her letter!" Fai told Yukito. "Except she used your full name, so we couldn't find you."

"You got out just in time," Yukito informed Fai. "I'll write you a slip for some pills that will get anything bad out of your system, okay? Just so you don't glow in the dark."

"I just want to sleep," Fai moaned.

"How odd. That's not a regular symptom."

"Someone drugged him," Kurogane supplied.

"I don't remember who," Fai added.

"It was Wave," Kurogane said.

"You can't know that for sure."

"It's gotta be Wave. Who else would it be? I'm going to kill that sonuvvabitch racer."

"Oh, his mechanic did give me a cup of coffee," Fai said suddenly.

"That sounds fairly suspicious," Yukito decided.

"Yuki, let's go see my sister," Touya said.

When Yukito found out that Sakura hadn't gotten any better or worse in the time since Syaoran had found her, he said that it was stunningly good luck and they might be able to wake her up at the hospital. Syaoran looked so excited that Fai wondered if the boy was going to faint.

- this is a pagebreak -

Two weeks later, Syaoran walked self-consciously into the hospital, holding a bunch of heatlamp flowers. The felt out of place in his uniform, and looked at the floor the whole way up to Sakura's room.

She was finishing lunch when he got there. She looked up at him and smiled brightly, and it made him think that maybe this was what a heart attack felt like. He held out the flowers. "H-here."

"You're Syaoran-kun, right?" she said. "You took care of me that whole time?"

"Y-yes," he said. "It wasn't any trouble! I'm really- I'm glad you're okay."

Touya, who was sitting by the wall, spoke up. "If you lay one finger on my little sister-"

"Touya! Stop being mean," Sakura said, turning slightly pink. "He took care of me for a long time, he's a good person."

Syaoran thought her voice sounded just like he'd imagined.

"Whatever," Touya said, but let him stay.

- this is a pagebreak -

"Did you take those pills?" Kurogane asked.

Fai rattled the bottle. "Tada! Last one." He swallowed it and tossed the bottle in the trash. "I am now officially not a mutant."

Kurogane laughed. "What the hell, you screwball."

"Kiss me, now that I'm human," Fai demanded.

Kurogane obliged, pulling the mechanic close and lifting his goggles out of the way.

"I smell like engine grease," Fai laughed.

Kurogane didn't let go. "So what?" he said, palms pressed against Fai's hips. "I love this smell."


End file.
